The Great Alone: A Novel (25 page)

The day crawled forward, with Leni constantly looking at the clock until it finally struck three o’clock.

“That’s it, kiddos. School’s done.”

When the kids were gone and the classroom fell silent, Leni packed up her stuff and was the last person to leave the school.

Outside, she retrieved her bicycle and pedaled idly down the center of Main Street, in no hurry to get home. Overhead, a bush plane puttered in a lazy arc, giving its passengers a good view of the small town perched on a boardwalk along the water’s edge. The marshes behind town were in full bloom, clumps of grass fluttering in the breeze. The air smelled of dust and new grass and murky water. In the distance, a red boat moved among the thick growth on its way out to the sea. She heard hammering at the saloon, but there were no workers to be seen outside.

She came to the bridge. Normally, on a day this bright at the start of the season, it would be crammed with men and women and children standing shoulder to shoulder, lines in the water, the kids on tiptoes, peering over the edge into the crystal-clear river below.

Now there was only one person standing here.

Matthew.

She coasted to a stop, stepped down on one foot, rested the other on the pedal. “What are you doing?”

“Waiting.”

“For what?”

“You.”

Leni dismounted the bike and fell into step beside him as he led her back toward town. The bicycle clanged and thumped over the bumpy gravel of Main Street. Every now and then the bell made a shivering little ringing sound.

Leni glanced nervously at the saloon as they passed it, but didn’t see Clyde or Ted working. She didn’t want anyone to tell her dad they’d seen her with Matthew.

They hiked up the hill past the church and ducked into the Sitka spruce trees. Leni set her bike down and followed Matthew to the point that jutted out over a black rock cliff.

“I didn’t sleep last night,” Matthew said at last.

“Me, either.”

“I was thinking about you.”

She could have said the same thing but didn’t dare.

He took her by the hand, led her to the bower he’d made before. They sat down, leaned back against a crumbling, moss-draped nurse log. Leni heard the waves on the rocks below. The ground smelled fecund and sweet. Shade fell in star-shaped patches between the strands of sunlight. “I talked to my dad last night about us. I even went to the diner to call my sister.”

Us
.

“Uh-huh?”

“Dad said I was playing with fire wanting you.”

Wanting you.

“Aly asked if I’d kissed you yet. When I said no, she said, ‘What the hell, baby brother, get going.’ She knows how much I like you. So. Can I kiss you?”

She barely nodded, but it was enough. His lips brushed tentatively against hers. It was like every love story she’d ever read; this first kiss changed her, opened her up to a world she’d never imagined, a big, bright, shining universe full of unexpected possibilities.

When he drew back, Leni stared at him. “Us. This. It’s dangerous.”

“Yeah, I guess. But it doesn’t matter, does it?”

“No,” Leni said quietly. She knew that she was making a decision she might regret, but it felt inevitable. “Nothing matters except us.”

*   *   *

C
OME AWAY TO COLLEGE
WITH ME
, Len. Please …

U of A is beautiful … you could still get in for fall. We could go together.

Together …

At home, she put her bicycle away and fed the animals, but she was so distracted she dropped an entire bucket of grain. Then she hauled water from the spring at the top of the hill. An hour later, when she’d finished her chores, she saw her parents go down to the beach and stand by the boat. They were going fishing.

They’d be gone for hours.

She could ride her bike to Matthew’s house, let him kiss her again. Her parents wouldn’t even know she’d been gone.

Stupid plan.
She would see Matthew tomorrow.

Tomorrow felt like a lifetime away.

She yanked up her bicycle and jumped aboard and pedaled away, past the canoe Dad had dragged home from the dump last week and the rotting husk of a dirt bike he’d been unable to get running again. The shadows of the driveway plunged down around her, chilled her.

She pedaled out onto the main road, back into the sunshine, and rode the quarter mile to the gated driveway. Wheeling around the open gate, she passed beneath the painted arch, with its tanned silver salmon carved into the wood, and kept going.

This is dangerous
, she thought, but she couldn’t make herself care. All she could think about now was Matthew, and how it had felt when he kissed her, and how much she wanted to kiss him again.

Here, the road was not so muddy. Someone had obviously taken the time to regrade the earth and put down gravel. It was the kind of thing her father would never do: smooth out a road to make life easier.

She came to a bumpy, breathless stop in front of the Walker house.

Matthew was carrying a huge bale of hay over to the cattle pen. He saw her and dropped the bale and came toward her. He wore an oversized hockey sweater and shorts and rubber boots. “Len?” She loved how he had renamed her, made her into someone else, someone only he knew. “Are you okay?”

“I missed you,” she said.
Stupid.
They had barely been apart. “I wish … we need
time
together.”

“I’ll come over to see you tomorrow night,” he said, taking her in his arms. It was where she wanted to be.

“Wh-what do you mean?”

“I’ll sneak over to see you.” He said it with such conviction that she didn’t know what to say. “Tomorrow night.”

“You can’t.”

“At midnight. Sneak out to meet me.”

“It’s too dangerous.”

“You guys have an outhouse, right? So it’s no big deal to go out. And do they ever look up in the loft for you in the middle of the night?”

She could dress warmly and go out and just not come back for a while. They could steal an hour together, maybe more. Alone.

If she said no right now, it would prove that Leni could live a sensible life, with the kind of love that no one would ever compare to heroin and she would never cry herself to sleep.

“Please? I need to see you.”

“Leni!”

She heard her father’s voice yelling at her. She pushed Matthew away, but too late. Her father had seen them together and now he was striding toward them, while Mama ran along behind him.

“What the
hell
are you doing over here?” Dad said.

“I—I—” She couldn’t answer.
Stupidstupidstupid
. She shouldn’t have come here.

“I thought I told you to stay away from my Lenora,” Dad said. He grabbed Leni by the bicep, yanked her to his side.

Leni bit down hard, so she wouldn’t make a sound. She didn’t want Matthew to know her dad had hurt her.

“Leni,” Matthew said, frowning.

“Stay back,” she said. “Please.”

“Come on, Leni,” Dad said, pulling her away.

Leni stumbled along beside her father, crashing into him and pulling away on the uneven ground. If she got too far, he wrenched her back to his side. Mama hurried along beside, walking with Leni’s bicycle.

Back in their yard, Leni yanked free and almost fell, scrambled across the muddy grass, faced him. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” she cried.

“Ernt,” Mama said, trying to sound reasonable. “They’re just friends—”

Dad turned to Mama. “So you knew about them?”

“You’re overreacting,” Mama said evenly. “He’s in Leni’s class. That’s all.”

“You knew,” Dad said to her again.

“No,” Leni said, suddenly afraid.

“I saw her leave,” Dad said. “But you saw her go, too, didn’t you, Cora? And you knew where she was going.”

Mama shook her head. “N-no. I thought she was going to work, maybe. Or to pick some balm-of-Gilead.”

“You’re lying to me,” he said.

“Dad, please, it’s my fault,” Leni said.

He wasn’t listening. His eyes had that wild, desperate look. “You know better than to hide things from me.” He grabbed Mama and dragged her toward the cabin.

Leni followed them, tried to pull Mama away.

Dad shoved Mama inside and Leni out of the way.

The door slammed shut. The bolt came down hard, with a clank, and locked them inside.

Then, from behind the door, a loud crash, a bitten-off scream.

Leni hurled herself at the door, banged on it, screaming to be let in.

SEVENTEEN

The next morning, the left side of Mama’s face was swollen and purple; one eye was blackening. She sat alone at the table, a cup of coffee in front of her. “What were you thinking? He saw you leave and followed your tire tracks in the mud.”

Leni sat down at the table, ashamed of herself. “I wasn’t thinking.”

“Hormones. I told you they were wicked dangerous.” Mama leaned forward. “Here’s the thing, baby girl. You are on thin ice. You know it. I know it. You need to stay away from this boy or something bad is going to happen.”

“He kissed me.”
He wants me to sneak out to meet him tonight.

Mama sat there a long time. Quiet. “Well. One kiss can change a girl’s world. Don’t I know that? But you’re not an ordinary girl in the suburbs with a Mr. Cleaver dad. Choices have consequences, Leni. Not just for you, either. For your boy. For me.” She touched her bruised cheekbone, wincing. “You need to stay away from him.”

*   *   *

M
EET ME
. Midnight.

All day, Leni thought about it. At school, every time she looked at Matthew, she knew what he was thinking.

“Please” was the last thing he said to her.

She’d said no and meant it, but when she got home and started on her long list of chores, she found herself waiting impatiently for the sun to set.

Time was not something she usually paid much attention to. On the homestead, the bigger picture mattered—the darkening of the sky, the ebbing of the tide, the snow hares changing color, the birds returning or flying south. That was how they marked the passage of time, in growing seasons and salmon runs, and the first snowfall. On school days, she took notice of the clock, but in a lackadaisical way. No one much cared if you got to school on time, not in the winter when some days it was so cold the trucks wouldn’t start, and not in the spring and fall when there were so many chores to do.

But now time commanded her attention. Down in the living room, Mama and Dad were cuddled together on the couch, talking quietly. Dad kept touching Mama’s bruised face and murmuring apologies, telling her how much he loved her.

At just past ten
P.M.
, she heard Dad say, “Well, Cora, I am about to drop,” and Mama answered, “Me, too.”

Her parents turned off the generator and fed the fire one last time. Then Leni heard the rattle of the beaded curtain being pushed aside as they went into their room.

Then, quiet.

She lay there, counting whatever she could: her breaths, her heartbeats. She willed time to pass even as its passage frightened her.

She imagined different scenarios—going to meet Matthew, staying in bed, not getting caught, getting caught.

She told herself repeatedly that she was
not
waiting for midnight, that she wasn’t stupid and reckless enough to sneak out.

Midnight came. She heard the last little click of the hand on her clock.

She heard a birdcall through her window, a little trill of sound that wasn’t quite real.

Matthew.

She climbed out of bed and dressed warmly.

Every creak of the ladder terrified her, made her freeze in place. Every footstep on the floor did the same thing, so that it took her forever to reach the door. She stepped into her rubber boots and slipped into a down vest.

Holding her breath, she unclicked the lock, slid the bar latch, and opened the door.

Night air rushed in to greet her.

She could see Matthew standing on the crest of the hill above the beach, his outline against a pink and amethyst sky.

Leni closed the door and ran to him. He took her hand and together they ran through the grassy, wet yard, slipped over the rise, and down the stairs to the beach, where Matthew had laid out a blanket and set big rocks on each of the four corners.

She lay down. He did the same. Leni felt the warmth of his body along hers and it made her feel safe even with all the risk they were taking. Normal kids would probably be talking nonstop, or laughing. Something. Maybe drinking beer or smoking pot or making out, but Leni and Matthew both knew they weren’t ordinary kids for whom sneaking out was expected. The crazy wildness of her father’s anger hung in the air between them.

She could hear the sea washing toward them and the spruce trees creaking in the murmur of a spring breeze. A pale ambient light shone on everything, illuminated the lavender night sky. Matthew pointed out constellations, told her their stories.

The world around them felt different, magical, a place of infinite possibility instead of hidden dangers.

He turned onto his side. They were nose to nose now; she could feel his breathing on her face, feel a strand of his hair across her cheek.

“I talked to Ms. Rhodes,” he said. “She said you could still get into U of A. Think of it, Len. We could be together, away from all of this.”

“It’s expensive.”

“They have scholarships and low-interest loans. We could do it. Totally.”

Leni dared—just for a second—to imagine it. A life.
Her
life. “I could apply,” she said, but even as she heard her dream given voice, she thought of the price. Mama would be the one to pay it. How could Leni live with that?

But was she supposed to be trapped forever by her mother’s choice and her father’s rage?

He slipped a necklace around her throat, fumbled to clasp it in the dark. “I carved it,” he said.

She felt it, a heart made of bone, hanging on a metal chain as thin as cobweb.

“Come to college with me, Len,” he said.

She touched his face, felt how different his skin was from hers, rougher, whiskery here and there.

He pressed his body to hers, hip to hip. They kissed; she felt his breathing turn ragged.

She hadn’t known until now how love could erupt into existence like the big bang theory and change everything in you and everything in the world. She believed in Matthew suddenly, in the possibility of him, of them. The way she believed in gravity or that the earth was round. It was crazy.
Crazy.
When he kissed her, she glimpsed a whole new world, a new Leni.

She drew back. The depth of this new feeling was terrifying. Real love grew slowly, didn’t it? It couldn’t be this fast, like a crashing together of planets.

Yearning. She knew what it felt like now.
Yearning
. An old word, from Jane Eyre’s world, and as new to Leni as this second.

“Leni! Leni!”

Her father’s voice. Yelling.

Leni jackknifed up.
Oh, God
. “Stay here.” She scrambled up and ran for the weathered steps. She rushed up their zigzagged path, her down vest flapping open, her boots clomping on the chicken-wire-covered steps. “Here I am, Dad,” she yelled, out of breath, waving her arms.

“Thank
God
,” he said. “I got up to take a leak and saw that your boots were gone.”

Boots.
That was her mistake. Such a small thing.

She pointed skyward. Did he notice how hard she was breathing? Could he hear the thud of her heart? “Look at the sky. It’s so beautiful.”

“Ah.”

She stood beside him, trying to calm down. He put an arm around her shoulders. She felt claimed by the hold. “Summer is magical, isn’t it?”

The grassy hillside hid the beach from view, thank God. Leni couldn’t see the curl of pebbled stone and crushed shells, or the blanket Matthew had carried over. Nor could she see Matthew. He was well below the crest of the hill between the cabin and the beach.

She clasped the bone heart around her neck, felt its sharp point burrow into her palm.

“Don’t do that again, Red. You know better. The bears are dangerous this time of year. I almost grabbed my gun and came looking for you.”

PERSONAL STATEMENT

by Lenora Allbright

“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

If you knew me, you wouldn’t be surprised at all that I start my college essay off with a quote from Tolkien. Books are the mile markers of my life. Some people have family photos or home movies to record their past. I’ve got books. Characters. For as long as I can remember, books have been my safe place. I read about places I can barely imagine and lose myself in journeys to foreign lands to save girls who didn’t know they were really princesses.

Only recently have I learned why I needed those faraway worlds.

I was taught by my father to be afraid of the world, and some of the lessons stuck. I read about Patty Hearst and the Zodiac Killer and the massacre at the Munich Olympics and Charles Manson, and I knew the world was a terrifying place. He said it all of the time, reminded me that mountains could blow up and kill people in their sleep. Governments were corrupt. A flu could come out of nowhere and kill millions. A nuclear bomb could fall at any second, obliterating everything.

I learned to shoot the head off of a paper target while on the run. I have a bug-out bag full of survival supplies by my front door. I can start a fire with flint and put a gun together blindfolded. I know how to adjust a gas mask for the perfect fit. I have grown up preparing for a war or anarchy or worldwide tragedy.

But none of it is true. Or it’s true but not the truth, which is the kind of distinction adults make.

My parents left Washington State when I was thirteen. We came to Alaska and forged a subsistence life in the bush. I love it. I do. I love the harsh, uncompromising beauty of Alaska. I love the women most of all, women like my neighbor, Large Marge, who used to be a lawyer and now runs a grocery store. I love how tough she is and how compassionate. I love how my mom, who is as fragile as a fern frond, has still managed to survive out here in a climate designed to destroy her.

I love all of it, and I love this state that has given me a place to belong, a home, but it’s time for me to leave the homestead and make my own way, to learn about the real world.

That’s why I want to go to college.

*   *   *

I
N THE DAYS AFTER
that night on the beach, Leni became a thief, invisible when she wanted to be. It was an illusion she’d practiced all of her life, and now, as she became a stealer of time, it served her well.

She also became a liar. Straight-faced, even smiling, she lied to her father
to steal the time she needed. There was a test to be taken early—at least an hour—a field trip that would keep her at school late. A research project that required her to take the skiff to the library in Seldovia. She met Matthew in the woods, in the shadowy stacks at Large Marge’s store, or in the abandoned cannery. In class, they were always touching under the desk. They celebrated his birthday together after school, sitting on the dock behind an aging metal boat.

It was wonderful, exhilarating. She learned things no book had ever taught her—how falling in love felt like an adventure, how her body seemed to change at his touch, the way her armpits ached after an hour of holding him tightly, how her lips puffed and chapped from his kisses, and how his rough beard-growth could burn her skin.

Stolen time became the engine that powered her world; on weekends, when hours without Matthew stretched out before her, she felt an almost unbearable need to leave the homestead, run to him, find a way to steal just ten more minutes.

The specter of school’s end cast a long shadow. Today, when Leni slid into her desk at school, she looked at Matthew and almost started to cry.

He reached across the desk, took her hand in his. “Are you okay?”

Leni couldn’t help thinking how small they were in this big dangerous world, just kids who wanted to be in love.

Ms. Rhodes clapped her hands at the front of the room, demanded attention. “There’s only a week of school left, and I thought it would be a good day for a boat ride and a hike. So, everyone, grab your coats and let’s go.”

Ms. Rhodes herded her chattering charges out of the classroom and through town and down to the docks. Everyone boarded Ms. Rhodes’s aluminum fishing boat.

They motored out into the bay and sped up, bumping across the waves, water splashing at their sides. The teacher guided the boat up the waters of the fjord, mountains all around them, down one stretch of water and up another, until they stopped seeing any cabins or boats at all. Here the water was aquamarine. Leni could see a sow and two black cubs walking along an isolated shore.

Ms. Rhodes pulled up to a dock in a narrow cove. Matthew jumped onto the weathered dock and tied the boat down.

“Matthew’s grandparents homesteaded this land in ’32,” Ms. Rhodes said. “It was their first family homestead. Who wants to see a pirate cave?”

Pandemonium.

Ms. Rhodes led the younger kids up the beach, marching through the heavy sand, stepping over huge pieces of driftwood.

When they rounded the corner of the bay and disappeared, Matthew took Leni by the hand. “Come on,” he said at last. “I’ll show you something cool.”

He led her upland, into knee-deep grass that ended at a sparse forest of stunted trees.

“Shhh,” he said, pressing a finger to his lips.

After that Leni noticed every twig that broke beneath her and every whisper of the wind. Occasionally a bush plane puttered overhead. At a wall of greenery, bushes grown to Alaskan size from all the water that ran down from the mountains, he showed her a path she wouldn’t have seen on her own. They ducked into it, walked hunched over in the cool shadows.

A small seam of light drew them forward. Leni’s eyes adjusted slowly.

A vista opened up in the break between the bushes: marshland, as far as the eye could see. Tall, waving green grass through which meandered a lazy, motionless river. Mountains were tucked in close, arms drawn protectively around the marshes.

Leni counted fifteen huge brown bears in the marshes, munching on the grass, pawing for fish in the stagnant water. They were great, shaggy creatures—called grizzly bears by most of the world—with giant heads. They moved in a shambling way, as if their bones were held together with rubber bands. Mama bears kept their cubs close and away from the males.